Wu Yonggang and the Ambivalence in the Chinese Experience of Modernity: A Study of His Three Films of the Mid-1930s

The interaction with the modern West has been a central part of Chinese history of the last hundred and fifty years and continues to dominate Chinese life today. One of the complexities of this cultural interaction is that even the most ardent iconoclasts in China failed to completely break away from the Chinese traditional mode of thinking.1 The tension between the need to hold on to one's cultural identity and the appeal of Western fads has been an essential part of Chinese experience with modernity in the twentieth century.